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I always knew Hillary was cool. I knew as far back as the baking-cookies-Tammy-Wynette days. She was cool when her husband messed up. She was cool when she headed the push for universal health care. I thought her gutsiness in trying new hairstyles was cool. She was cool even in pastel pantsuits—she carried them off with panache (okay, maybe I’m delusional on that one). So now, it appears young people are discovering Hill’s coolness. If you haven’t heard, let me explain.

Last week, what started out as a joke between two young men based on a photograph of Hillary Clinton, went viral on the Internet. In the photograph, by Diane Walker of Time, Clinton is shown looking at her cell phone, wearing sunglasses (looking cool). The photograph was given a series of captions by two guys, Stacy Lambe and Adam Smith, about what Hillary might be texting, and to whom. In their tumblr blog Texts from Hillary, Lambe and Smith wrote, "What started as a joke at the bar between two friends turned into a national conversation about Secretary Clinton and went as far as talks about 2016.” Within a few days after starting the joke, Hillary Clinton responded with some funny texts of her own; eventually the three met in Washington.

Why would one picture of Hillary texting make such a splash? Yes, of course she knows how to text. She may be over 60, but she’s not clueless.

So finally some people are noticing Hillary’s coolness. Is it because she has stopped wearing the pantsuits? Let her hair go long? Because the cool kid in class (Barack) managed to get universal health care passed (although it may be taken away soon, but that doesn’t matter), something she tried to do twenty years ago, before its time? Is it her passion? Her ability to chide world leaders? Her speech in China about human rights and women’s rights being the same thing? Is our undying affection for Bill finally spilling over to her?

My theory is this: she’s not the world’s mother anymore. Back when she was running for President, the choice between the two Democratic candidates was clear: the young, exciting, handsome man, or your mother? I don’t care who she is, in our world every woman gets labeled. We are either a good girl or a slut, brainy or bimbo—we often have to be all at once. The recent uproar about women who work in the home and outside the home is nothing new, it is the same woman-on-woman battle that was trumped up after Hillary made her comment about baking cookies in 1992. We seem to need to label each other instead listening to each other. The media frenzy around this subject only obscures the real issues of equality and fairness. Hillary has been given a lot of labels ever since she was a young woman , and each time, she blew them off. For all the ground breaking things she has done and will do, this is perhaps one we don’t always notice and should.

Now, whether we like it or not, the world has given Hillary a new label, one that gives her a lot of freedom. She’s the world’s grandmother. Grandmothers are in a different category than mothers. She can now wear what ever the heck she wants and tell us all what to do, and we will listen.